Feb 14 07
SecondLife and corporate communications
Is this a PR fad, or a real tool for corporate communications?
It’s new. It’s nutty. It’s in all the magazines. The kids are crazy for it. It’s … the Next Big Thing. It’s SecondLife, a virtual world where you can create a character and live, well, a second life. Is it a game? There is no objective, unless you count amassing wealth in the in-game currency of “Lindens” (which can be exchanged for real money, and SecondLife has a fully functioning economy and exchange rates against worldwide currencies).Some people think this is a great new step for corporate communications. I think the jury is still out on that one.
PR folks are simply mad for this new gadget - but we all know that PR and corporate communications often live in different worlds, with different agendas. In the example above, Sun Microsystems used SecondLife to hold a virtual press conference. People who have characters in SecondLife (called “avatars”) could come in, watch and even participate.
This has some unique advantages, but also has some very real disadvantages. Imagine going to a busy sales team and telling them they needed to do the following to participate in an event:
- Visit a site and download new software
- Install the software
- Create a character
- Orient yourself within the software (some will get it right away, most will spend hours trying to figure out how to use it)
- Find a faster machine if it doesn’t work (SecondLife can have major latency problems if your processor isn’t fast enough)
- Once oriented, attend the event with your avatar (a.k.a., your cartoon character) and interact with other avatars (a.k.a., other cartoon characters)
- Oh by the way, your interaction is only text on the screen, you can’t talk, you can only ask questions via chat (although most of the time you’ll hear audio through your computer speakers)
Is SecondLife a real tool for corporate communications? Maybe. You can play video within the game, you can chat, you can play audio - it cane be run like a webevent where you are IN the webevent, instead of just WATCHING the web event. There are practical applications, but do they outweigh the hurdles your people have to go through in order to participate?
SecondLife has early traction as a training tool, both at universities and at corporations. Thompson NetG is setting up virtual training campuses within the game.
A lot of people need to do a lot of playing in variety of communication situations to find out.
But for now, for real-world corporate communications, SecondLife is basically an IM chat with cartoons.
